September 26th, 2017

Parts 1 through 3 of this four-part series on developing Web services in Java SE first presented an overview of Web services and Java SE’s support for developing them. The series then focused on developing SOAP-based and RESTful Web services via this support. Part 4 wraps up this series by focusing on advanced topics.

This article first introduces Java SE’s SAAJ API for working with SOAP-based Web services at a lower level. It then discusses how to create a JAX-WS … Read the rest

June 28th, 2017

Modularity, a key but highly controversial feature of the upcoming Java 9 release, looks to be back on track with the Java community’s adoption of a proposal that had failed in an initial vote weeks earlier.

With new round of voting completed this week, the Java Community Process Executive Committee passed by a 24-0 vote the Java Platform Module System public review ballot, the subject of Java Specification Request 376.

June 23rd, 2017

With the initial release candidate build for Java 9 now published, Oracle has proposed that from here on out, only “showstopper” bugs be fixed for the production Java 9 release, which is due September 21.

The proposal floated this week represents a further tightening up of bug-fixing goals for RDP (Rampdown Phase) 2 of the Java upgrade. The plan calls for fixing all P1 (Priority 1) bugs critical to the success of Java Development Kit (JDK) 9. Also, builders … Read the rest

May 17th, 2017

Looking to stave off criticism of the now-jeopardized Java 9 release, Oracle’s top Java official defended the platform against what he termed falsehoods around its accommodations for Apache Maven, third-party frameworks, and existing code.

“There seem to be many misconceptions out in the world about what Java 9 is, what the Jigsaw module system is, how it’s going to impact people,” said Mark Reinhold, chief architect of the Java platform group at Oracle, at the Devoxx UK conference in London … Read the rest

Java Development Kit 9, the next edition of standard Java, had been proceeding toward its planned July 27 release after earlier bumps in the road over modularity. But now Red Hat and IBM have opposed the module plan. “JDK 9 might be held up by this,” Oracle’s Georges Saab, vice president … Read the rest

May 2nd, 2017

Azul Systems looks to up Java performance with the introduction of Falcon, a just-in-time compiler to be featured in the company’s Zing Java runtime.

Based on the LLVM compiler platform, designed for server workloads, and optimized for recent Intel and AMD architectures, Falcon bests Oracle’s HotSpot Java platform by anywhere from 5 to 250 percent in production performance, depending on the application, according to Azul. It becomes the default compiler in the 17.03 release of Zing, which also … Read the rest

April 6th, 2017

Oracle is moving forward with its Java-on-Java intentions, in which Java would be implemented on itself via the experimental Project Metropolis.

With Metropolis, the company proceeds on building a JIT (just-in-time) compiler written in Java, said Georges Saab, Oracle vice president of development for the Java platform. The project was described in a recent presentation as an experimental clone of JDK (Java Development Kit) 10, hosting work on ahead-of-time compilation and the Graal compiler. Metropolis also would provide for … Read the rest

March 3rd, 2017

Java could be getting a garbage collector that allocates but does not reclaim memory, providing special testing benefits.

A draft Java proposal recently floated named Epsilon GC calls for development of a garbage collector that handles only memory allocation. Authored by OpenJDK contributor Aleksey Shipilev, a principal software engineer at Red Hat, the proposal is described as offering an “arbitrarily low-overhead garbage (non)-collector.” Shipilev hopes to provide a passive runtime garbage collector implementation with a bounded allocation limit and minimum … Read the rest

February 13th, 2017

JEP 213: Milling Project Coin defines a set of small language changes for Java 9. Three of these changes are related to the OpenJDK Project Coin-based language changes that debuted in Java 7, and the other two changes are considered Coin-like. This post introduces you to all of these tiny language improvements.

Smoothing Project Coin

JEP 213 broadens the scope of Java 7’s SafeVarargs annotation type and diamond operator while enhancing the try-with-resources statement. This section explores all of … Read the rest